CSBG Archive

The Comic Book Fools of April – The Justice League Goes to French Class

Every day in April I will be featuring a humorous comic (either an issue or a series of strips) that I found particularly amusing. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com the comic stories that are your favorites when it comes to hilarity, and I’ll see if I can’t feature some of them this month, as well!

Today we look at the time that a bunch of members of Justice League Europe ended up in the same French class as the Injustice League! Hilarity courtesy of writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis and artists Bart Sears and Pablo Marcos…

The gist of the issue is as follows. Justice League International recently opened up a separate branch of the Justice League in Europe. However, almost all of the team members are American, so that causes a bit of a problem when they find themselves headquartered in France. So the members of the team who don’t speak French go to a night school to learn the language. Meanwhile, the comically inept Injustice League are in Europe (with the theory being that there are less superheroes there), but they, too, find themselves in a jam when they can’t rob banks effectively without knowing the language, so they, too, end up in French class – the same French class as the JLE, naturally!

This is the intro of the scene…

and here we see things play themselves to a fever pitch…

Do yourself a favor and pick up the issue (Justice League Europe #6) to find out what happens next!

chad

nice pick for loved how both teams were way in over their heads trying to function in the class and two trying not to wind up blowing each others covers plus love the look of the teachers face when she sees how much gum big sir chews

What I particularly liked about the JLI titles, besides that they were funny, is that they portrayed both heroes and villains as just people. The one with a reformed Black Hand running into Guy Gardner and Ice at a movie theatre and all his therapy going out the window was a great example of that.

Much as I love the genre, superhero fiction tends toward a sort of reactionary worldview in which there are good guys and bad guys and trying to rehabilitate them is a waste of time, because they’ll inevitably get out of jail, put on the same silly costume and commit the same crimes or worse. In that sort of world, someone like the Punisher becomes not just a psychopath but someone who makes a lot of sense, because if villains can never be reformed you may as well kill them. The way run-of-the-mill super-powered criminals were portrayed in JLI, you could totally see them living a normal life if things were handled a bit differently, and that’s a rarity in superhero comics. That just-some-dude version of Black Hand is wayyy more interesting to me than Geoff Johns’s eeeeeeevil necrophiliac version.